Liya Shapiro is an artist who builds worlds from the inside out. The London‑based singer‑songwriter moves through love, identity, mental health, and emotional fragility with a rare kind of intentionality—one shaped not only by music, but by her background in art history, fashion, and anthropology. Each discipline leaves a visible imprint on her work: art informs the way she hears and interprets sound; fashion shapes the visual language she directs; anthropology deepens her exploration of the human condition.
Her debut EP Another Woman is the fullest expression of that multidisciplinary lens. Dark, cinematic, and unafraid of emotional contradiction, the record traces a years‑long experience of unrequited love and the slow, difficult transformation that followed. Across chamber‑influenced arrangements, late‑night introspection, and atmospheric orchestral swells, Liya documents the nonlinear nature of healing—how longing can linger, regress, dissolve, and eventually reshape you into someone new.
Since releasing her first single “Mirror” in 2021, Liya has steadily carved out her own space as a fully independent, self‑managed artist. With over 150,000 Spotify streams, growing press support, and a sold‑out headline show at The Troubadour, she continues to build an immersive universe defined by vulnerability, strangeness, and emotional truth. Her songs feel less like products and more like portals—haunting, human, and deeply felt.
Today, Liya joins us to talk about the world of Another Woman, the duality at its core, and the creative journey that led her to become “another woman” entirely.
Your EP Another Woman is built around a single, years‑long experience of unrequited love. At what point did you realise this story wasn’t just a chapter in your life, but the spine of an entire body of work?
It happened almost by accident and very late, when I was already over it. For most of that time I wasn’t writing towards a record at all, I was just writing individual songs that each had their own little world and served as a way to vent and let my feelings out. Night Thoughts was written spontaneously at night, both the lyrics and the melody just came to me out of the blue, no piano involved, and by the time it happened the whole story was already nearing its end. The verses of Hold Me Tight were born at the very beginning and the choruses came when it was long over. He’s Earthquakes appeared somewhere in the middle. The throughline only became obvious when I started recording Another Woman, the song that came last, and realised I had enough material for an EP united by the same story.
You’ve described the EP as “an emotional diary.” How did revisiting older versions of yourself — especially the one still inside the heartbreak — shape the way you approached the final tracklist?
It was a little uncomfortable to plunge into all that again, and I felt embarrassed for myself at times, but all of these older songs are just so honest that I decided to leave them be. The most ambiguous one was Hold Me Tight, because the verses and pre-chorus are seven years old, written during the summer all of this began, while the chorus is a very recent invention, so the song is essentially two different women talking to each other across a gap of years, and it kind of helped me reconcile the whole thing. I feel like the tracklist ended up being shaped more by the sonic qualities of the songs than by the lyrical ones. The order doesn’t really enhance the storytelling in any way, because the logical progression would have been He’s Earthquakes, Night Thoughts, Another Woman and then Hold Me Tight. I decided to order them purely on how they flow musically, and I feel like in a way that makes the story more interesting, because it evades a linear narrative that would have been the most obvious and, arguably, the most boring choice.
Art history, fashion, and anthropology all inform your creative identity. Can you share a moment in the making of the EP where one of those disciplines directly influenced a musical decision?
He’s Earthquakes is the obvious example. When we were in the studio working on that track, I kept coming back to J.M.W. Turner’s storm seascapes, and I was using them as a reference for the actual sound of the thing rather than for any of the imagery in the lyrics. What I wanted was that impressionistic blur he does, where you genuinely cannot locate the horizon, where the sea and the sky have collapsed into each other and you’re left inside all that motion with nothing to hold onto. I wanted the strings to behave the same way, swelling and dissolving into one another instead of sitting in tidy separate lines, and I think that’s quite an art-historical way of approaching an arrangement, because it’s a visual instinct that ends up getting translated sideways into sound.
The title Another Woman holds a dual meaning: the woman he chose, and the woman you became. How did that duality evolve as you moved through the writing and production process?
The second meaning wasn’t there at the beginning, it only occurred to me when I decided on the name for the record. When I wrote the song itself, I was thinking only about her and the aching feeling of being replaced by someone real rather than by an idea. But once the EP as a whole was coming together, the second meaning just sort of popped into my head. I realised I’d changed enough in the process of making this record that the title also described my own response to what happened and the kind of person I became on the other side of it all.
“Another Woman,” the title track, was written in a single sitting after a painful discovery. What was happening emotionally in that moment that allowed the song to arrive so fully formed?
I think it arrived that fast precisely because I wasn’t trying to write anything. I’d just found out and sat down without a concept or a plan, simply because I needed to put the feeling somewhere it could exist outside of me, and the song was what came out when I did that. There’s a kind of emotional pressure that leaves no room whatsoever for revision or second-guessing, so you end up just describing what’s happening to you as it happens, and that’s why the song is so direct, almost embarrassingly so. There are no metaphors in it at all, no allusions, it reads like a notes app entry set to music, which is exactly what it was. The whole thing, words and chords together, took under an hour.
“Night Thoughts” captures the hour when suppressed feelings resurface. What does late‑night introspection reveal to you that daytime logic can’t touch?
The day comes with a built-in defence system. There are things to do and people to see and a version of yourself you’re maintaining for the world, and all of that keeps certain feelings at a comfortable distance from you. Once that scaffolding comes down, everything you’ve been holding off floods back in, and you’re left alone with it in a way that’s very hard to argue with. I’m almost exclusively a night writer for exactly this reason, I’ve genuinely never written anything worth keeping during daylight hours. Night Thoughts is named after that phenomenon quite literally. I wouldn’t say the night reveals some deeper truth to me, it just removes all the ordinary interruptions that let me get away with avoiding one.
“Hold Me Tight” merges two versions of you — seven years apart. What was it like to hear those two selves coexist in the same song, and did it change how you see your younger self?
It’s quite strange, for sure. The verses and pre-choruses came out of that original summer, when I had no distance from any of it and was really just trying to survive the feeling but also to write some “cool poetic song lyrics”, which is genuinely what I thought I was doing back then. I was probably trying too hard, and some of it feels a little embarrassing now, not gonna lie. The chorus came to me years later, completely unplanned, at the piano, in one of those bursts where the words just arrive whole and out of the blue. To be honest, even the chorus isn’t something I would write now, I’ve outgrown both of those versions, though I look at them with fondness. The chorus resonates with me more, because I’m still in pretty much the same headspace, still no one to hold me, still longing for some ethereal silhouette of a non-existent person to make me feel safe and loved. I don’t think anything has changed about how I see my younger self, though. She was just a naive, broken-hearted girl who fell in love for the first time, was rejected and still held out hope against all odds because it was too hard to let go. I feel sad for her, she had a really hard time.
Your closing track, “He’s Earthquakes,” draws inspiration from Turner’s storm seascapes. What parallels do you see between his treatment of weather and your treatment of emotional turbulence?
What draws me to those paintings is how little interest Turner has in painting a storm as a contained, describable event. The weather in his work is the entire visual field coming apart into motion, and you can look for the horizon all you like, it simply isn’t there for you anymore. That felt like the right way into the emotional territory of this song, which lives inside something very overwhelming. Musically it meant resisting the urge to resolve anything cleanly, letting the strings behave like weather instead of accompaniment, so they build and recede and occasionally swallow the vocals rather than staying underneath. I wanted listeners to come out of the EP the way you come away from one of those paintings, a little disoriented maybe. And I also felt like those sea storms reflected the kind of earthquakes I’m singing about better than any actual earthquake imagery could, whatever that would even be, because water has a certain smudgy quality to it that complements the feeling of emotional tremor and inundation. It’s like an earthquake under the sea, that’s what this song feels like, and that’s what a lot of Turner’s paintings feel like to me too.
The EP doesn’t resolve its pain so much as dissolve into it. Was it a conscious choice to avoid a traditional emotional resolution, or did the music naturally resist closure?
To be honest, I never intentionally thought about it, it’s just the way I feel and write. I think there’s only one song I’ve ever written that actually resolves, and even that was an intentional later addition. It’s from the next EP and isn’t out yet, so everything I’ve released so far is unresolved by nature.
You’ve said you’re “not the same person who wrote these songs anymore.” What part of yourself did you have to let go of in order to finish this project?
I had to let go of the belief that this particular story was the most interesting thing about me and of the fear that now that it’s over, I’d have nothing left to write about, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. I actually think now that this story is probably the least interesting thing about me and that I have so much more to say, and I’m happy to finally be free to write about other things. Finishing the EP meant closing that chapter for good, and there’s a peculiar sadness in that, because you end up missing the intensity of the thing almost as much as you’re relieved to be free of it. I’m already deep into something completely different now, something with very little to do with any of this, and I don’t think that shift would have been possible if I hadn’t let that version of myself finish speaking first.
As a fully independent, self‑managed artist, you’ve built momentum through vulnerability and creative control. What has independence allowed you to do that a traditional industry path might not?
Mostly it’s allowed me to be creatively free. Nobody has ever asked me to change a lyric, or rush or delay a release, or shape the visual world around something commercial, and that’s because there’s never been anyone with the authority to ask that of me. The cost of that is quite huge, however. There’s nobody to hand things off to when I’m exhausted or when I honestly don’t know what the right next step is, and the administrative weight of doing all of this alone is pretty heavy, especially when you don’t have a clue what you should be doing in the first place. I also struggle a lot with being my own boss, I’m the type of person who needs external structures to stay organised, and handling everything by myself really freaks me out most of the time. But what I get in exchange is that the work is entirely mine, from the first line of a lyric to the last detail of how it’s packaged, so nothing gets between me and the finished thing, which is very rare and means a great deal to me.
Your music often feels like a portal — immersive, cinematic, emotionally raw. When listeners step into the world of Another Woman, what do you hope they carry back into their own lives?
Mostly the sense that they’re less strange and less alone than they might have felt going in. I write from something extremely specific to me, and it keeps turning out to be a far more common experience than I ever assumed it was, which I find genuinely moving every time someone tells me so. I’m not able to hand anyone a resolution, since I haven’t entirely arrived at one myself. What I’d like people to leave with is a kind of permission, to feel something as intensely as they actually feel it, without having to explain it away or apologise for it first.
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